ANOTHER missed chance to end the killing

LAST January, after the man we now know to be Mahdi Mohamud went wild with a knife on the streets of Manchester, I asked: ‘Will it ever sink in? The authorities are still trying their best to claim that the knife incident was part of some sort of terrorist grand plan.

‘All that spending on “security” has to be justified somehow. But the suspect has, in fact, been detained under the Mental Health Act. Anyone with his wits about him knows that there are far more crazy people about than there used to be, many of them with knives, and it isn’t much of a stretch to connect this with the fact that the police and the courts have given up enforcing laws against marijuana, which some idiots still say is a “peaceful drug”.’

And what do you know? Although the court was told (as so many courts are, these days, all the time) that Mohamud had ‘paranoid schizophrenia that may have been triggered by smoking cannabis’, the silly judge, Mr Justice Stuart-Smith, dutifully proclaimed that this obviously unhinged loner had taken part in what he said was ‘beyond question’ a terrorist attack. It’s not ‘beyond question’ at all. Crazy people often latch on to political or religious movements to make themselves feel more important and less lonely.

It does not mean they understand or truly follow them, or that they are taking orders from a bearded supremo in an Afghan cave.

This ludicrous misunderstanding helps nobody. You could hire another 500,000 MI5 agents and subject us all to 24-hour surveillance, and it wouldn’t prevent attacks like these.

Because they are caused by the police and the courts ignoring the law of the land, and refusing to do anything about the spread of marijuana.

My friend Ross Grainger, who is as exasperated by this rubbish as I am, has spent several years cataloguing the terrifying number of cases in which violent criminals turn out to be unhinged by long-term use of this supposedly

‘soft’ drug. He has now compiled them in a book called Attacker Smoked Cannabis, available through Amazon. Read it.

And if you know any judges, policemen or BBC journalists, buy them one for Christmas. They need it.